I’m reading Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by neurologist Oliver Sacks. I found it at the library on a shelf of new releases. The new release designation means little more to the library’s information system circuitry than that the time between check out and due date is shorter. It needs to be returned Thursday. While in some ways entertaining, I am not so impressed with it thus far. I was expecting more.

Still, the idea of returning it unfinished is agitating like few things are. When starting a book, I feel as though I’m committing myself to it. Opening the cover and reading the first lines has a psycho-physiologic analog: the thorn of a rose bush instantaneously sprouts from some location along my spine. While not painful by itself, starting many more than a few books at a time would be uncomfortable; no thorn recedes completely until the last page of its associated book has been satisfyingly turned. This is what compels me to finish even books that don’t hold my interest; the diluted ecstasy that accompanies the recession of a thorn as progress through a book is made, the return to a spine that won’t draw blood.

My mother’s sister is visiting from Victoria, B.C. It’s unfortunate that she arrived shortly after I returned from Minneapolis and will be leaving the same weekend I drive to Anchorage; I would’ve liked to have been here a week or so without her. I don’t like that she keeps busy with the same sad activities of baking little dessert things and tidying up the grounds around the property. I don’t like that I think those are sad activities. I especially dislike how she makes a point to acknowledge, in a meek, mouse-like manner, everything my father says, as if she’s living in a past where men are superior to women in all ways.

I am disappointed in myself for fostering ill feelings towards people who have been nothing but friendly. Mostly, here, I am referring to the aforementioned aunt, though the potential for it to spread to anyone I’m not accustomed to being around is worrisome. Many of the apts I’ll be looking at next week would be my own, but a few would be house-share roommate situations. How terrifying if after the initial meet & greet and two week settling in phase I developed irrational and unwarranted grievances against the people I was living with. Solitary is a dangerous normalcy.